Effective Altruism Is a Waste of Money: Can it Be Fixed? (Hard EA)

In this episode, Malcolm and Simone make a significant announcement: they are stepping back from their day jobs to launch 'Hard EA,' a platform focusing on true, impactful solutions to humanity's major existential threats. Disappointed by the current state of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, they express concerns over its focus on social signaling rather than substantive change. They break down their new initiative’s core values and priorities, including pragmatic and pluralistic solutions to societal issues, biological innovation, and AI safety. The duo aims to attract like-minded individuals and organizations committed to making a genuine difference and confronting the hard truths of our time.

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/EGFRjwwS92

Songs Used:

EA Has Capitulated (The Hard EA Song):

Beyond Pleasure and Pain (The Anti-Antinatalist Song):

We are More Than Animals (The Anti-Antinatalist Song):

Website: HardEA.org

[00:00:00] What could be more important than ,

Malcolm Collins: Earning the approval of normies.

.

Richard? Science?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I'm excited to be here with you today. This might be the most important announcement from a personal perspective that we have made on this show but recently we have decided to begin stepping back from our day jobs to focus more on trying to fix it. , this untethering society that we are dealing with right now, as well as the many threats to humanity's flourishing that are on the horizon at the moment. This major decision has come downstream of two big realizations I had recently.

The first was, as I do about every year or every other year, it's, I took inventory of all of the major threats or big things that could change about the future of humanity so I can better make my own plans for the future and [00:01:00] for my kids future, but this time I did something I hadn't done before.

Decided to also take an inventory of all of the major efforts that are focused on alleviating these potential threats. And I had assumed, as we've often said, you know, we've been affiliated with the periphery of the effective altruist movement for a while that while the effective altruists may have problems, they were at least competently working on these issues because they were signaling that they cared about them.

But when I looked at the actual solutions they were attempting, I was shocked. It made me realize that a lot of the funding that I thought Was going to fixing these issues was going to something akin from that scene from Indiana Jones

Speaker 10: We have top men working on it right now. Who?

Speaker 12: Top men.

[00:02:00]

Speaker 14: The goal was to reform charity In a world where selfless giving had become a rarity No vain spotlight, no sweet disguise Just honest giving, no social prize But as the monoculture took the stage It broke their integrity, feigning righteous rage Now every move is played so safe Ignoring truths that are Make them chafe.

EA has capitulated to everything it said it hated. Once they

were bold, now they just do what they're told. In caution they lost their [00:03:00] way. Time for a heart EA.

Malcolm Collins: Second I have always considered us as again Adjacent to the effective altruist movement or living was in the periphery of this movement and heckling it towards making more responsible decisions Recently, as I was going over the stats for our podcast and other podcasts, I realized that our podcast is more popular than the most popular Affective Altruist podcast, 80, 000 Hours by not a small margin either.

Now I will note here that Spencer Greenberg's podcast, clearer thinking, which many associate with the effective altruist movement is actually more popular than ours. I will not deny that. I really liked Spencer.

Good friend. But

Simone Collins: he personally doesn't identify as an effective altruist.

Malcolm Collins: And when I realized that I was like, Oh, I'm no longer like a heckler on the outside. Pointing out the mistakes that other people are making. I am now somebody who has to [00:04:00] take responsibility for fixing things, especially if the timelines that humanity is facing are short. And so we will create an alternative with heart EA.

org. So, what we have done to distribute this, we're going to start doing grants. So if you have ideas that you think might appeal to us, we would like to help fund you help get stuff out there.

Obviously we are looking to raise money as well. We already have a 5 0 1 C three nonprofit charity. So if you know any big potential donors who might be interested in this, please let them know about this project.

And I note here that unlike traditional EA, we are not just looking for iterative solution to the world's existing problems, but anything that can move humidity forward into the next era of our evolution.

Whether that's genetic modification technology, gene drives brain computer interface, artificial wombs, or new forms of governance and city states.

Anything, the traditional effective altruists were afraid of touching because of its potential effect on their reputation, but that needs to happen for humanity to compete with AI and eventually get to the [00:05:00] stars.

Speaker 11: We stand on the brink of a breakthrough in human evolution.

Malcolm Collins: Effective altruism.

Speaker 11: Held back the pace of scientific discovery for decades. They believed in me. I believed my methods were too radical, too controversial, and they tried to silence me. New patrons emerged who possessed an appetite for my discoveries. And we With this knowledge, what new world could we build?

Speaker 6: Young people from all over the globe are joining up to fight for the future.

Speaker 8: I'm

Speaker 7: doing my

Speaker 6: part. I'm doing my part. I'm

Speaker 7: doing my part. I'm doing my

Speaker 9: part, too. They're doing their part. Are you? .

Malcolm Collins: And the 2nd thing I noted here was. Oh, shoot. Most of the mainstream figures who could have stand or run or help the EA movement [00:06:00] continue to grow have been Order 66 by the movement. And I realize that even some nerds don't know what this means. This is the order that the Empire gave to kill all the Jedi.

Speaker 51: Now, let's get a move on. We've got a battle to win here.

Speaker 52: Sir!

Speaker 53: Execute Order 66.

Blast them!

Malcolm Collins: What I mean here is when they have somebody who is extra effective, they turn on the individual. In a

Simone Collins: weird way, like to an extent that I've never seen it. Any other cause area or social space.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And as such many people who might be their greatest champions now, like say Spencer Greenberg, or just like, I don't want to be affiliated as having that attached to my brand, but this provides opportunity to us.

One, it makes it hard for them to say, you guys aren't real EA when [00:07:00] we have a bigger platform than any of the quote unquote, real EA individuals. But two, it allows us to attempt to cure the movement, even through our advocacy. By that, what I mean is the effective altruist movement was originally founded with the intention of saying, Most philanthropy that's happening right now is being done for social signaling reasons or personal signaling reasons.

It's either being done to signal to other people, you're a good person or to signal to yourself, you're a good person. So when you're faced with a decision, like should I indulgently spend two years doing charity work like building houses in Africa or something like that, or should I go take that job at McKinsey and then send that money to charity and see how many houses I can build?

I choose the McKinsey route because while it may be less good for personal signaling or social signaling, it is the more efficacious thing to have an impact on the world. Unfortunately, this movement has been almost totally captured by social signalers, specifically people signaling to the urban monoculture.

Speaker 14: as the [00:08:00] monoculture took the stage It broke their integrity, feigning righteous rage Now every move is played so safe Ignoring truths that are Make them chafe.

EA has capitulated to everything it said it hated. Once they

were bold, now

Malcolm Collins: And this is largely downstream of something the movement should have expected from itself. It should have said, if we're not going to care about social signaling and actually making a difference. We need to prepare to be the villains. We need to prepare to be hated by those in power because we are not going to toe their lines.

Speaker 2: Now you're trying to make me out to be the bad guy. Yes,

Speaker: I'm trying to make you a bad guy. We're both bad guys. We're professional bad guys. Ding. Hello.

Malcolm Collins: And instead they took the exact opposite approach, which is to say, we want to be socially [00:09:00] respectable. We want to be accepted by the mainstream power players in our society. We want to suck up to them.

When they dropped this it was the original sin that led to the downfall of ea

and then I think a

Simone Collins: lot of this Is because from the beginning they didn't focus on the misaligned incentives that cause people who are altruistic to get overly focused on signaling in the first place.

In other words, they didn't focus on making sure that everyone's efforts were self sustaining. They supported efforts that required ongoing fundraising and ongoing fundraising requires social signaling. So that those groups that survive were dependent on fundraising who are. Are the ones who are better at signaling, not the ones who are better at solving the problem.

So I think that's part of it. It's not that these people became corrupted. It's that they never addressed the inherent aligned and misaligned incentives. That made this problem in the first to

Malcolm Collins: elaborate on what she means by this is if you have a large bureaucratic institution that is dedicated to social good [00:10:00] individuals was in that network are going to be drawn to it for one of 2 reasons.

Either they want status or they want to do social good. The, the problem is, is that the people who want to do social good, they need to focus on doing social good. Whereas the people who want status can focus all their time on politicking. As well, the people who want to do social good must act with integrity, which somewhat binds their hands.

Whereas the people who want status, well, they can use the urban monoculture's status games to sabotage other people really easily. And so they always end up rising to the top. Whereas the people actually trying to do something efficacious because at least 50 percent of their time needs to go to like actual efficacious work or, you know, near 100 percent of a signalers time can just go to signal.

And then I want to say

Simone Collins: this is something that's not just. You're not only going to see it in the nonprofit or the altruistic world. This also shows up in some of the largest work from home experiments performed. One of the earliest big, large scale work from home experiments performed found, for example, that employees, this was I think an online travel agency [00:11:00] that tried this employees who worked from home were more effective.

They got more work done. They were better employees in terms of getting the work done in terms of the bottom line of the company. But those who stayed in the office got promoted more. So again, this is about where is your time going? Is your time going to FaceTime to signaling, or is it going to getting the work done?

And if you have a system where you can only continue to get resources or get promotions or get more money by signaling, you're going to start focusing on signaling. And those who survive who last in those organizations are going to be the signalers, not the do gooders.

Speaker: You only fight these causes cause caring cells All you activists can go f**k yourselves That was so inspiring! What a wonderful message!

Malcolm Collins: . Being in those rooms when the EA movement was being formed. , all those years ago, knowing all those edgy young artists. Who wanted to. Fix things in big ways. seeing what the movement. Has turned into

Taken over by bureaucratic self-indulgent [00:12:00] normies playing the DEI game. I can only imagine this is how they feel,

Speaker 17: man seeks a good time, but he is not a hedonist. He seeks love. He just doesn't know where to look. He should look to nature. Gentle aquatic

Malcolm Collins: Shrimp.

Speaker 17: have all the answers.

Speaker 18: Your door was locked, so we let ourselves in.

Speaker 17: You may have found my

Speaker 18: inner sanctum. Shut up. Now give us the plans or whatever the hell you have.. I

Speaker 17: have a tank full of gentle cuttlefish.

Speaker 18: Give us the cuttlefish. Cuttle I can't do this.

Speaker 17: You abandoned me! I have caught on fast. Look into

my eyes!

Malcolm Collins: Most of the effective altruistic organizations, have become giant peerage networks. These weird status dominance hierarchies that are constantly squabbling over. the most petty of, of disagreements. [00:13:00]

Simone Collins: Just for people who don't know what peerage is, if you were a peer of the realm you were essentially made noble by a ruling class, like a king or king or queen.

So what we're talking about is essentially this sort of declared aristocracy that can be very insular and incestuous. People who live off of

Malcolm Collins: stipends who then are basically forced to stand the people above them in the pyramid.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Well, and this is the, here's the other thing. And this is why I think there's such a big garden gnome problem in the EA industry.

To give a little context for those who haven't seen our other discussions about garden gnomes. In Regency era England, there was this trend among very wealthy households, you know, people who had large estates to have what was referred to as an ornamental hermit. And these were basically, like, learned wise men who they would have live in a cottage on their land and then, like, come to, you know, live there.

You know, their, their dinner parties and stuff when they had house guests and kind of impress them with their philosophy and they were often required to do things like not drink and let their [00:14:00] nails grow long and grow a beard. So they looked to be sort of like a very picturesque intellectual, and we've noticed that within the industry, this is the industry, I guess, space, social sphere.

This is the 1 place where you actually see modern ornamental hermits. That is to say, People who are in the EA space and rationalist space who literally make their money by sort of being at a an intellectual who is paid, who has a patron, who is a very wealthy person who's in this space who sort of just does sub stack writing and philosophy and who goes to these dinner parties and makes their patron look good.

Malcolm Collins: Which is insane. It's, it's a wild trend that we have seen.

These notes are almost always male in. Frequently end up.

Congregating.

In these giant poly group.

houses where they all are dating the one woman who could sort of tolerate them. Kind of feel like marrying Simone and taking her out of San Francisco. This is what I saved her [00:15:00] from.

Speaker 20: She's just marrying all 1, 000 of us and becoming our gnome queen for all eternity. Isn't that right, honey?

Speaker 21: You guys are

Speaker 20: buttfaces! You think you can stop us, ? . The gnomes are a powerful race. Do not trifle with them!

He's getting away with our queen! Who's giving orders? I need orders!

Malcolm Collins: the overwhelmingly male population of the EA movement makes it very easy to spot the. Portions of it that have become corrupted by DEI, beyond repair.

Just look for any organizations that board has more women than men on it, or that leadership is more female than male, or even just anywhere near gender equal,

Given how overwhelmingly male the movement is. That would only happen if they were using an extreme amount of discrimination. And prejudice in their hiring policies and promotion policies.

And outside of the immorality of a system that is systemically, unfair and prejudiced.

This also.

Means the most [00:16:00] talented, efficacious and hardworking people was in an organization. Aren't the individuals running it, which means tons of donor money is being wasted just to signal that we're good boys.

And I would say that this isn't the only problem. You also have a problem from the bottom up of the movement being very corruptible. They just put no thought into governance theory when they were putting everything together. From the bottom up, the problem is they have a massive tyranny of the unemployed problem.

Any movement decides a lot of its ideas based on what's going on in the EA forums. Forums are susceptible to a governance problem. We described in the practice guide to governance called turning of the unemployed, which means that the individuals who have the differential time to spend all day online on a forum or something like that an environment where the amount of time you can dedicate to a thing gives you additional power within the community.

Well, those people are being sorted into that position in life, either because they don't have like. Fred networks, right? You know, they don't have other things that they're doing. So they have been expelled from other communities. And they don't have day [00:17:00] jobs often or day jobs outside of the Ea peerage network or even

Simone Collins: responsibilities like taking care of Children or elderly people or even really needy pets.

Like they're just sitting there in front of their computers.

Malcolm Collins: And so these communities always tend towards these sort of average ideas that will get you respect by the urban monoculture. When you have one of these voting based online networks, instead of the way like our core community, our discord works, where it's like, well, whoever said the last thing is the one who's there.

You end up with People really striving for what they think is mainstream acceptable in society to say to post because those are the things that the average d*****s unemployed person who's sitting at home is going to end up upvoting. This is why Reddit is so brain dead these days. It is also why the EA forums are so brain dead in exactly the same sort of normie take way.

We've also wild here is when I went and checked, it looks like our discord is more active than the EA forums right now.

If you want to check it out, you can check it out [00:18:00] from a link I'm going to put in a pin comment. Generally the best way to use it is to focus on individual episode commentary.

Rather than just chatting the town hall.

I understand that the format changes make this comparison a little bit apples to oranges, but.

Th their top posts are only getting like 50 comments. And then if you go just like three posts down, you get posts with no comments. That is wild to me.

When contrasted with ours, you know, 210, 733, 124, 128, 417, 265.

Then go to the top, voted post on the EA forum. And it's 28 50 64 0 0 2 0 4 4. 1814.

Which I think goes to show that the EA community has transitioned from being well, a community to appear EJ network.

But anyway, continuing with the point that having a community where norms are based on the vote or the average liked opinion. ,

Is going to lead [00:19:00] to the platforming of ultra normie low-risk beliefs and the demonization of any belief that could rock the boat or interrupt the peerage network.

and this is why a movement that said, we will focus on things that don't get us social signaling and that no one else is focused on is now doing things like environmentalism, which is like the most overfunded area when contrasted with other cause areas.

Speaker: Alright, that does it! I f ed it!

Oh, now she figures it out.

Malcolm Collins: Or, You know, they're completely not touching pronatalism and no EA org has ever done anything in the pronatalist movement.

Never touched pronatalism, never advocated. They have explicit rules against it. They have explicit rules against doing anything about dysgenics, which is one of the things we often talk about, which it's the polygenic markers associated with things like IQ are decreasing within the developed world at a rapid rate to the rate where we should expect a one standard deviation decline in IQ within the next 75 years or so.

You can look at our video [00:20:00] on possible on this particular topic. But they have in their rules that they're not allowed to focus on human genetics. And as such, they can't address some of the biggest challenges that our species might be facing.

Speaker 14: They duck their heads from problems grand As fertility collapse, dooms our land Dysgenic's a word they fear But ignoring it will be severe AI safety, a shiny show Funding the theatrics for money they blow Without a plan, just spin and grin While real solutions kick in E A has capitulated To S N N H A T E D Once they were bold Now they just do what they

[00:21:00] are told In caution they lost their way Time for a hard E A Our species is put at risk by their cowardice It is time for a hard E A For a movement that empowered us

Malcolm Collins: But it gets worse than all of that. So let's be like, okay, if they're not giving money to that stuff, one, how much money are they actually giving out here?

And two, what are they actually doing? So by 2022, over 7, 000 people had signed a pledge to donate at least 10 percent of their income to effective charities. They are now more than 200 EA chapters worldwide, with conferences attracting thousands of attendees. And they now give out around 600, well, this was in 2021, around 600 million in grants a year, around four times the amount they did five years earlier.

And This is really sad to me that these individuals who aren't maybe super in touch with like what the EA orgs are actually doing with their [00:22:00] time. Think that they're, you know, tithing this amount that makes them a quote unquote good person and the orgs aren't doing anything. So let's give them an option here for the individuals who want to do this for an org that is actually trying to solve things like AI safety, dysgenics, pronatalism, all of the major problems that our species is facing at the moment.

Oh, before I go into the projects that they had here one of the things I really find very interesting about Effective Altruism is one, their absolute insistence on trying to cozy up with The leftists , and Democrats and also the vitriol they have been shown by Democrats and leftists.

Isn't that

Simone Collins: interesting? Yeah, that first, effective altruism , is fairly little known. It's becoming more known. But really only in the context of leftist media outlets looking at it with great suspicion. Who are these EA Silicon Valley elites deciding how we should live our life? Like, it's definitely viewed as a Silicon Valley elite [00:23:00] thing.

It's viewed with great suspicion and it's viewed as being evil or like, like questionable or Puppet mastery or a little Illuminati ish. I think because it's associated with some people.

Malcolm Collins: I think that that's a misunderstanding of why the left is so hostile to it. I really, yeah. So EA fastidiously tries everything it can to not piss off leftists.

Yes. You're like the urban monoculture. They are like, we will not break a single one of your rules. But unfortunately, that puts them into the same status game that the urban monoculture people are playing. So if I'm a mainstream lefty politician or political activist, the EAs are trying to compete with my social hierarchy for attention, for capital, for Everything they come into a room and they're like, okay, we can spend X amount on nets in the like malaysia and it can lower malaria rates by this amount, which like lowers net suffering by Y amount.

And I'm here, like, don't you know that today is trans months or [00:24:00] like, don't you know that today is the black lives matter, like protests and they're like, Well, I mean, I understand that, like, myopically, that's what's going on in the United States right now, but we're trying to reduce aggregate suffering and look at my math.

And that gets you shouted out of the room because you are issuing an explicit status attack on them when you do this. And worse, you know, when I read a lot of the places attacking them, they're like they fall into two camps often. It's like, well, they're using capitalism to advocate for like taking money from these wealthy capitalists and then using that to quote unquote, try to make the world a better place.

But like this these wealthy capitalists shouldn't exist at all. They're just perpetuating or sort of, you know, wallpapering the capitalist system. I understand this attack entirely. Like if you're a leftist and you're a socialist, you're like, what are you guys doing? You are making the capitalists look good.

It's better that we just tear everything down. And I think this is because of the EA mistakenly believes that when they're talking to urban monoculture people, the socialists and stuff like that, that they [00:25:00] actually want to reduce suffering in the world because that's what they tell people they want to do.

Yes. Instead of disclaim power. And so they make very, because they're hugely autistic, make very dumb decisions of taking them at face value. And then they keep getting shouted out of the room and then come back. Whereas us, the right side, the hard EAs, which is fundamentally more of a right leaning movement.

We have been accepted by the political apparatus. You know, we're regularly meeting with groups like, you know, the Heritage Foundation or political operatives in D. C. And they don't mind being affiliated with us. They like that even whereas you guys were treated like lepers. We have the V.

P. Of the major ticket regularly giving pro needleless messages. If the E. A. Could get a single one of their messages into a mainstream politician's mouse in the same way we have been successful at this.

As you might be able to tell we recorded this before Trump's team won. And before we saw just how much influence our side was going to have in his policy agenda.

[00:26:00] But I wanted to just reflect on how crazy this is that they had. Hundreds of millions of dollars and about a decade. And they were unable to really get on board, any mainstream democratic politician into their agenda. We are a two person team and we're able to get close with and get into. Presidential policy agenda our stuff within. A year of trying,

The incompetency. And wastefulness is almost impossible to overstate. You are literally setting your money on fire. If you give it to them.

Speaker: It's not about money. It's about sending a message.

Malcolm Collins: but you see this where ever the urban monoculture has taken hold. I mean, just look at the democratic campaign. They had three times the amount of money Trump was using and he trouts them. Any group that has given into the urban monoculture is going to be wildly inefficient in how it spends money, because it's going to spend so much of its money on [00:27:00] signaling, and it's going to have so many incompetent people at its upper levels.

But here. I also want to note just how wildly inefficient they've been in even the cause areas they purport to care deeply about. Let's take something like. Waking the world up to how risky AI could be. All right. They had a. Generation of priming material, , just considered the Terminator franchise we come in with the per natalist movement where we have a generation of Everybody thinking, oh, it's, it's, there's too many people. Oh, D population of the problem, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, just two people on a shoestring budget this year, , we've had two, three guardian pieces on us. Rolling stones piece Couple New York times.

Shout outs. Wall street journal feature. And then just today we had another, , wall street journal photographer at our house. So they're going to have another piece coming up. Though, this was actually the one who did the famous shot of Luigi man, Joni. And we have woken up the general public. To oh, this is the real problem.

And if you're like, well, a [00:28:00] lot of those pieces have a negative slant to them and it's like, well, yeah. And a lot of pieces about have a negative slant to them as well. The key is, is, are you playing the negative slant to build your own image or build awareness for your cause? And here I would ask you to. Just be rational and think about the people you've talked to recently. Who has done a better job piercing the mainstream mindset. AI risk and a non-glamorous. Humorous way, like in a constructive way or perinatal, listen.

You know, the fact that we have things like the young Turks now saying, well, Malcolm's crazy, but he's definitely right about that. Perinatal, this stuff. That's wild. And that we have pierced to the other side that much in such a short time period was just a two person team. And yet a literal army of people has had trouble piercing the popular narrative in a way that builds and constructive conversation.

Not only that, but within the perinatal is movement. We have built a movement that other than one guy almost entirely gets along, [00:29:00] supports each other, despite our radically different beliefs

And when I see diverse beliefs, I mean, diverse beliefs in a way that you just weren't able to get at all within the traditional EA movement. Abe you go to one of our confidence. Yes. You'll get a bunch of the , nerdy, autistic programmers and entrepreneur types, but you'll also get a lot of, conservative religious leaders,

Whether they're heredity rabbis. Catholic priests, or evangelical media players.

It's wild that despite Hardy EA taking a much more confrontational in a hard line approach to the issues, it has the potential to be a much bigger tent movement.. And I think that it shows just the core failure of the way that they were signaling and approaching politics, which was accept us instead of we're different.

And we take pride and standing for what we know is right and just. And here I would also note that there is a slight ethical difference between these two movements in terms of the end goal, whereas the E. A. S. Sort of treat it. The world right now as if they're utility accountants trying to reduce aggregate in the moment suffering right now [00:30:00] Which is how they appeal to the urban monoculture the hard eas are much more about trying to ensure that long term humanity survives and Stays pluralistic and we'll talk about the core values we have but it's much more Let's create that intergalactic empire and make sure we don't screw this up for the human species In this very narrow window we may have left which we'll talk and we're

Simone Collins: not I'm not afraid to be judged as weirdos for being interested in getting off planet or thinking about the far future, whereas the effective altruist community, while technically being long termist is very self conscious about it because know that being long termist can make you look weird just because honestly, even thinking two decades ahead has us basically in sci fi.

You know what I mean? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, it doesn't just make you look weird. It puts you at odds with the goals of the urban monoculture. The urban monoculture is not interested in the long term survival of humanity. And for that reason, when they try to [00:31:00] signal long termist goals and this is the other category of anti EA article you'll read where they're like, well, here's the problem with being an extremist utilitarian.

You know, they, they, There, it's like, well, fortunately the hardies aren't extremist utilitarians. We're a completely different philosophical system, which we'll get to in a second. Because extremist utilitarianism is just silly. It's like positive emotional states are the things that when our ancestors felt them, it caused them to have more surviving offspring.

It's not like a thing of intrinsic value.

Speaker: feelings born of chance in fields of ancient strife. They kept our tribe from

failing help. Give birth to modern life, just signals from our past. They served a vital role, but meaning goes beyond the scars that time upon us. Beyond the pleasure, beyond the pain We stand on roads of forbears [00:32:00] paved in grit and strain Don't throw away the promise that tomorrow can sustain There's more to life than hollow thrills or running from the rain They claim that it's all worthless if the joys cannot wait But they dismiss the wonders we've inherited right here.

The years of struggle handed down the future's bright unknown. It isn't just the fleeting spark of comfort we are shown. We carry on a story with pages left to write. Our tapestry is woven from both darkness and from

light.

Malcolm Collins: And I think you can see, and, and, and focusing on in the moment, suffering causes you to make very big [00:33:00] mistakes in terms of long term. human suffering and it causes you to do things which you cannot question within the current EA movement because if you question the EA movement might look bad, right?

And again, it's all down to signaling. So where are they putting their money? The Global Health and Development Fund distributed over 50 million in grants in recent years. GiveWell contributes directly to large amounts of funding to global health charities like Against Malaria Foundation, Malaria Consortium, and New Incentives.

Open Philanthropy has increased its funding to focus on global health and well being in recent years. Like that is so Dumb so dumb

Like First malaria, you could just do a gene drive in mosquitoes and for like fifty to a hundred thousand dollars Erase the problem of malaria in 50 years I mean, yeah, sure you might get arrested But if you look at the number of people that are dying and i'll add it in post

It's estimated that approximately a thousand children under the age of five die from malaria every day.

608,000 people who [00:34:00] die in a given year.

Like the idea that we now have the technology if we cared about that to just Fix it.

Sorry, for people who don't know what a gene drive is

Speaker: Gene drives are designed to eliminate unwanted traits in insects and other animals. They work by pushing out genetic modifications through whole species, until eventually every critter has been changed into something we have intentionally engineered. The idea isn't especially new, but it's only very recently that advanced gene editing techniques have made human designed gene drives possible. CRISPR uses specially designed molecules that run along the strands of DNA in an organism's genome and seek out specific sequences of genetic code., such as replacing the parts of a mosquito's genome that allows it to host malaria causing bacteria.

Parasites, for instance. Unfortunately, every time a CRISPR mosquito mates with a wild one, its modified DNA is diluted down, meaning that some of its offspring will still be able to carry the malaria [00:35:00] parasite. And this is where gene drives comes in.

When the mosquito mated, the built in code would ensure that every single one of its progeny would inherit the same traits, as well as inheriting the CRISPR code that would ensure the anti malaria gene was passed on to every future generation.

In other words, the new gene would be irresistibly driven through the whole mosquito population. And eventually, every mosquito would become a human designed, malaria free insect. And this is not a technology that's restricted to mosquitoes.

Malcolm Collins: Note that here you'll get some complaints from people saying, well, the reason we have an employee gene drives in mosquitoes yet is because the technology isn't fully there yet, or it hasn't been as effective as we hoped. But if you go to an AI and ask what's the real reason, the real reason is that they're scared to implement something that can affect. Entire natural population and it's borderline illegal right now.

The problem I have with this [00:36:00] explanation is.

It's estimated that approximately a thousand children under the age of five die from malaria every day.

Speaker 11: They believed in me. I believed my methods were too radical, too controversial, but there were others in the shadows, searching for ways to circumvent their rules. Freed from my shackles, the pace of our research hastened. Together, we delved deeper into those areas forbidden by law, and by fear. And we With this knowledge, what new world could we build?

Malcolm Collins: And we have the technology to do this. It's largely tested. People are going to freak out. It would be an F word. And that's why they won't consider it. So instead, they give millions and millions and millions of dollars. It could go to actually saving humanity's future, but also at the end of the day, if you save some, you know, whatever person dying of malaria, right?[00:37:00]

Are they really likely to be one of the people who ends up moving our civilization forwards at this point and and and every iterative amount that we move our civilization forwards right now in terms of technology or preventing major disasters is going to be multiplicatively felt by people in the future.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: so. Decisions right now when we're looking right now at the short timelines humanity has Whether it's whether it's with falling fertility rates or whether it's with Dysgenics or whether it's with AI That you would be so indolent. It's not like that. These things are intrinsically bad things to be focused on It's just they are comical things to be focused on when the timelines that face humanity are so so so short at this point Yeah,

Then they focus on long term and existential risk. , these are people who focus on long term catastrophic risks. I really appreciate this area of funding. I have always thought, Oh, this is really good. Like they focus on AI threats and stuff like that, or biosecurity threats.

And then I started, at least within the case of AI, actually looking at the [00:38:00] ways that the individual most funded projects were trying to lower AI risk. And I was like, This is definitely not going to work, and we'll get into this in just a second, but it will understand that you're basically lighting your money on fire if you give it to a mainstream A.

I. Safety effort within the E. A. Movement. And that is really sad because you have people like Ellie either being like, just give us like 10 more years to do more research. And then when I look at the research being done, I'm like this obviously won't work, and the people working on it must know it obviously won't work.

And that makes me sad. But that's the way things turn out when you get these giant peerage networks. By the way, about 18 percent of EA causes right now in funding go to AI safety related causes. So it is a very big chunk.

Simone Collins: Gosh, that's actually not as much as I thought, just in terms of how much Mindscape seems to be going to it within the movement.

So that's. Well, the other area they spend

Malcolm Collins: a ton on, and we've met many EA's in this space, which I just think is a comical space to be wasting money on. Is animal welfare is a significant EA focus. The Animal Welfare Fund [00:39:00] distributes millions and grants annually. Open Philanthropy has made large grants to farm animal welfare organizations.

About 10 percent of highly engaged EAs report working on animal welfare cases. This is a tragedy that Anyone is working on this for two reasons.

Simone Collins: It feels like a hack to me is they're like, Oh, okay, well we need, again, it's that utility accountant, accountant problem whereby people are like, okay, so I want to max out the number of utility points I get.

And there are so many more shrimp in the world and it's so easy to make shrimp's lives easier. So I'm going to focus on shrimp happiness and wellbeing. And it's. Yeah, and I can just create, so they

Malcolm Collins: basically do this thing where a life's worth is like it's amount of cognitive experience, whether that's pain or happiness or anything like that, sort of divided by the cognitive level of the animal.

And they're like, well, even though shrimp are a lower cognitive level than humans if you get enough of them and they can support like the same biomass can support [00:40:00] more of them And if you, if you go with this line of thinking, just to understand why this line of thinking is so horrifying and stupid.

If you, I actually followed this to its conclusion. It's like, well, then what I should do because monkeys can survive on less nutrition than humans is basically get a giant laboratory of monkeys. It was like screws in their necks in virtual reality environments being pumped with dopamine and other chemicals.

And you just walk and you're in like this, this giant laboratory was like, Hundreds of thousands of monkeys like dazed out on drugs, like just living this perfect happiness unit life.

Simone Collins: yeah, all while like sterilizing humans because they take more resources and it's better just to max out. Yeah, it's, it's such a

Malcolm Collins: dumb philosophy when you actually think through it.

That you would think that these Pre evolved environmental conditions that led the things to have more offspring are like what you should be focused on as an existential thing in life.

Speaker: say it's all about the highs and lows, all about the Russian pain that [00:41:00] flows. But that's just the story of creatures past, whose only goal was just to last. A primal code. Etched into our veins A leftover echo of ancestral gains We're more than pleasure, more than pain We can choose to rise above the old refrain inovation calls our name A legacy that we must sustain Don't let the animal side define Future shaped by minds That shine

Malcolm Collins: And it leads to huge amounts of EA funding going to Really feckless stuff like as you said like shrimp welfare and stuff like that whereas if humanity does and this is the problem if humanity goes extinct No matter what, [00:42:00] all life is gone.

All life that we even know existing in the universe is gone. Because the sun is going to keep expanding, and we likely don't have enough time for another intelligent species to evolve. If humanity spreads off this planet, we are going to seed thousands to billions of bios. That will be as rich and likely more have a higher degree of diversity than we have on earth today on some of the super earths We may seed have a higher number of species living on them And we'll even be able to if it turns out that our super advanced ai and descendants are like, okay Suffering actually is a negative thing.

So I'm going to build little nanite drones that go throughout all of the ecosystems that humanity owns and erases their suffering feelings and ensures that the zebras feel ecstasy when they're being eaten, you know, like that's the, that's the end state where you actually create the positive good, even if it's very small minded philosophy does have any sort of a, an account to it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So I guess we find it doubly offensive is, is. [00:43:00] One, we disagree with happiness entirely, though, I guess, you know, we have to respect that some people do and then to just the the way people are trying to max it out is,

Malcolm Collins: well, you know, there's tons of people. It's not like a neglected cause area. Tons of people are focused on this stuff, you know, just, yeah.

Is this problem to the animal rights activists? Okay. And so when you give money to something like

this is going to, I'm just telling you, you have lit your money on fire. And that's why we need to create something that actually puts money to things that might matter in terms of long term, good things happening.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, then other global catastrophic risks. These fun projects like climate change Again, that is the most non neglected area in the world, really just to signal to progressives. Any EA org which hosts any discussion of climate change, whoever is running that org should immediately be voted out.

It is, it is absolutely comical and that is a sign that your organization is becoming corrupted. One of the things that I would advocate with HARD EA is I want to [00:44:00] bring in As many of the existing EA orgs into the hard EA

Simone Collins: 100 percent because I think the thing, and I feel like they want it. When we, here's a really common thing also in the EA community.

You talk with anyone who you associate with effective altruism and they're like, oh, I'm, I'm not an EA. I'm not a rationalist. I'm not an EA.

Malcolm Collins: It's like, that's how you determine someone's an EA, is how wrong their explanation is, as to why they're not an EA. And that's

Simone Collins: because, because, these people actually believe in effective altruism, and I think they see inherently the, the altruistic bankruptcy of the, of the main social networks of the main organizations of the main philanthropic efforts.

And they're keen to not be associated with that because they really care about effectual altruism. So we, we in part are deciding to become more actively involved with giving grants, with making investments in the space through our nonprofit, because we [00:45:00] We want there to be a place for these people. We want there to be more of a community for actual effective altruists, for hard effective altruists.

And that's really, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Also, also I will, before I go further with this. A part of this is just, we're doing this for the entertainment value, which is to say we're doing everything

Simone Collins: for the

Malcolm Collins: entertainment that the EA movement has done is they have aggressively, as they become more woke and more woke and more woke and more interested in just signaling, signaling, signaling, shot all of their original great thinkers in the back.

When I say they order 66, their entire movement, they really did. There are so. Right now people with any sort of name recognition or public facing this that publicly identify as E. A. Anymore. That. Us being able to come out there and be like, yeah, we're the real effective altruists that it's a bit of a troll Because the the ea movement should have [00:46:00] these big names that can come and say oh no malcolm and simone the pro natalist people They're not effective altruists.

They're like Some weird right wing thing, but everyone who had the authority to make that type of a claim is gone from the movement You know Even though and to just know how like how corrupted the movement has gotten we did another piece on ea Which I didn't have go live because I felt it was too mean to ellie eiser And I don't want to do anything that mean spi